KJ
Special Fiction Feature
Peace Hotel
(an extract from
the forthcoming novel, Marble Mountain)*
Wayne Karlin
Kiet walked out of
the terminal. The heat slapped her, the sun blinding her, so that the
people milling if front of the exit doors were at first a blurry, shifting
mass that slowly distilled into individual faces: cone-hatted, baseball-capped,
bare-headed, her own mirrored face breaking into a thousand reflecting
shards. A taxi-driver reached for her bag, and she showed him the address
of the mini-hotel she had booked, the Hoa Binh.
As soon as they pulled out of the airport access, the chaos of the street
claimed the car, the way, she thought, a river claims you as soon as
you loosen your boat and are in its current, in a different world than
the shore. She rolled down the window as they wove through a tangle
of cars, carts, motor scooters, cyclos, bicycles, the taxi shooting
with sickening, heart-stopping precision through sudden and miniscule
openings that presented themselves like the sudden choices of fate,
her face buffeted by wafts of hot air and scored by stinging dust, her
nostrils assailed by the stink of raw gas fumes. Next to the car, a
Honda scooter held an entire family of five; daddy driver, mom behind
with two kids pressed between her and her husband’s back, one
kid on dad’s lap, the other squatting, fitted under the windguard.
All of them were masked. The traffic surged around Kiet, not a river
now but a fantastic dance, the swirl of motor scooters and cars and
pedestrians threading confidently and fatalistically through the loops
and curves and sharp turns and leans of their own journeys, the machine
gun bursts of un-muffled engines, the blare of horns, the whiff of sweat
and fish sauce and frying meat laced faintly under the stink of the
gas fumes, and, everywhere the press of people, and again the oddity
of seeing all of them stamped with her face manifested into all its
forms: laughing, screaming, weeping, smiling, greeting, eating--sitting
on low plastic stools in front of restaurants, stalls, food carts, fanning
chop sticks to their faces, stuffing grilled meat and pate and banana-leaf
wrapped rice and pork balls into their mouths. Roast ducks, their skins
crisped and golden, hung from steel hooks in the window of a restaurant.
The surprise configured into their faces, probably by her own imagination,
seemed to again underscore the sudden transformation of idea into sounds,
sights and smells, the heat and dust on her face, the trickle of sweat
running down her back.
The traffic knotted into immobility. No, just a traffic light. It looked
prosaic, out-of-place. If she were here long enough, would it become
an object of nostalgia, homesick-making? On the sidewalk, an old woman
in gray, patchy pajamas, squatted by some bamboo cages stuffed with
live ducks. As if she was showing them their karma, hanging in the window.
As Kiet watched, one duck wiggled free, stepped out into the road, as
if pulled by her thoughts. The traffic heaved suddenly forward and the
duck was immediately flattened by a motor scooter. The driver and the
girl behind him wore what looked like tennis outfits, their faces impassive
behind black Oakleys. They sped off weaving through the traffic, the
old woman cursing after them. One instant the duck was there, squawking,
waddling, sure about whatever duck plans it had; the next it was a spilt
sack of bleeding meat and a coil of greasy intestines on the road. No
one, except Kiet, looked at it or the old woman. She felt a flash of
anger, and then shame. It was ridiculous, racist, of course, to see
the casual accident as an exemplar of some Asian indifference to life:
She’d grown up in a rural area where she couldn’t drive
on any road without seeing the burst corpses of opossums, raccoons,
and various house pets, some of them run down maliciously.
She had seen something that was in its life in one instant and a corpse
the next, and she’d seen it here. The duck meant nothing. Except
what it seemed to call to her, here, in this place. The chanced path
of a life.
Kach San Hoa Binh, the Peace Hotel, was in a long, narrow building squeezed
between a larger building with iron mesh screens over all its windows,
and an alleyway filled with noodle stands. The narrow “lobby”—an
extended, high-ceilinged hallway, was lined with parked motor-scooters,
Pollock dribbles of oil laced all over the floor. She checked in, walked
up to her room on the third floor. A cheap pressed-wood armoire, a narrow
bed, a rickety air conditioner above the window, controlled by a boxy
remote, its control buttons labeled in Korean; a large thermos and a
tray with tiny cups on it on a low, carved table. A tiny balcony that
hung out over the street. She opened the doors, walked out onto it.
The hotel, she’d been told, was near the river, but she couldn’t
see the water.
She lay on the hard bed. She was in Viet Nam. She said it aloud, like
an incantation.
As if she feared for its feathering against reality.
The wall across from her was covered, floor to ceiling, with a beige
and tan photograph of a bamboo forest and under the sputtering neon
light, she could glimpse the vague shapes of animals. Deer or tigers
or wolves. She felt floaty and jet-lagged enough that she could squint
and let something in herself relax and allow the shapes to flow and
shift; she could make them into creatures of menace or promise, guides
that would lead her to the secrets of the forest. Lagged. Who she was
lagging some distance behind who was lying here in this bed.
She thought to rest before hunting down Mr. Duong. But she couldn’t
sleep. She got up and went back to the double doors that opened to the
balcony. It was a rickety affair, just wide enough for her to stand
on, her back on the wall, and bisected by a huge rubber plant in an
ornate concrete base. The heat immediately annealed to her skin, like
a hand pressed on her face. Inside an apartment across the street, through
a barred window, she could see a gold Buddha with an incense jar in
front of it, and a bald man in a t-shirt and boxers sitting cross-legged
on the floor in an identical posture, eating from a bowl of rice. It
was early evening, and the traffic in front of the hotel hadn’t
diminished and outside the fumes were strong, but laced with the smell
of cooking beef and chicken, and the sharper odor of burning charcoal,
drifting up from the from the noodle soup stand in the alley next to
the building. A radio was playing the theme from Titanic, the
lyrics, sung in Vietnamese, somehow more annoyingly cloying than they
were in English. Men and women and a few kids were sitting on the tiny
blue plastic stools she had seen everywhere, eating, drinking their
coffee or tea or beer, eating, smoking cigarettes, laughing, the music
of their voices, of the language that teased at the edge of meaning,
coming to her ears. She lit a cigarette. The woman behind the huge black
pot of cooking noodles looked up at her from the alley and smiled, her
existence untroubled by Kiet’s doubts, her belly undoubtedly full.
Kiet waved at her like an idiot.
Let me stay, she whispered, the voice of a fifteen year old homeless
runaway suddenly insinuating itself into her mouth.
Copyright
held by the author
*
"Peace Hotel" and “The Stone Carver” (published
in KJ #68) are extracts from the novel Marble
Mountain, to be published in 2008. In 1973, author Wayne Karlin
contributed to and co-edited the first anthology of fiction by U.S.
Vietnam veterans, Free Fire Zone, and in 1995 he co-edited
and contributed to The Other Side of Heaven: Postwar Fiction by
Vietnamese and American Writers, with Le Minh Khue and Truong Vu,
an anthology that covers all sides of the war. With Ho Anh Thai, he
also co-edited the anthology Love After War: Contemporary Fiction
from Vietnam (Curbstone, 2003). He is a professor of language and
literature at the College of Southern Maryland, and the American editor
of Curbstone Press’ Voices from Viet Nam series. He served in
the U.S. Marine Corps in the Vietnam war.
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